The issue features an article by Alain Badiou titled “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process.”

In it, Badiou clarifies two statements on art, that it is neither ideology nor science:

Statement 1 Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain to the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection. Statement 2 Art is not science. The aesthetic effect is not an effect of knowledge. However, as differentiating realization and denunciation of ideology, art is closer to science than to ideology.